Alois Kubiš

“A warrant to arrest our family came to the police station in Černá Hora in 1942. My father was sick with pneumonia at that time. The police officers in our village were good men, you could say they were patriots, even though they served under the Protectorate – they warned my dad in advance. Dad was running a high fever but he went and he managed to get rid of the gun he owned, he threw it into the pond. It was the large pond under the chateau. They arrested them. They arrested my dad, mom and my sister. I was on summer holiday in Vémyslice in southern Moravia with my grandpa and grandma at that time. They were my father’s family. The police came to arrest my parents and they asked about me. They were ordered to arrest all of us. My parents told them that I was in southern Moravia. The Gestapo meanwhile arrived to Vémyslice and they arrested my grandpa, my uncle and aunt with their two little children, my other uncle with aunt and two children, and they also arrested my third uncle – they waited for him at the bus stop when he arrived from work. The family had a small farm there, there were three houses next to each other, and when grandma saw what was happening, she told me: ´Hurry up, run to the yard and hide behind the strawstack.´ I hid there and they took everybody else with them, and I remained there alone with the cattle and three empty houses.”

“At the Gestapo station in Třebíč they kept us separated, boys and girls apart and separated from mothers and fathers. At Jihlava, males and females were separated but men and boys stayed together. Then they transported us to Prague, to the Petschek Palace, the Gestapo headquarters. They made us stand in a long corridor and people from other groups who had been arrested were brought in. That’s where I met František, the youngest brother of Jan Kubiš. He was fourteen. The older men advised him: ´Don’t say that you belong to them. You belong to us.´ Then they led us into a room, there was a table inside, and on top of it there were cylindrical glass containers with severed heads of these paratroopers. They asked each of us: ´Do you recognize them or not?´ They asked each of us, and we all said: ´We don’t know them.´ That was it. They had us get on a bus and transported us to Terezín. František and I somehow got among the adults when we arrived there. The other children were taken somewhere else, to some villa near Charles Square, but the two of us somehow got to Terezín with the men. They discovered it about three days after, and so they brought us back to Prague, to Krč.”

“It was okay up until the arrest, I went to school, I attended four years of elementary, then after passing an exam I moved on to town school [upper primary school - trans.]. The class split there - some went to the town school, and some continued in years five through nine. Well, and because my parents exercised, I did as well, as a little Sokol. It was great until the arrest. Friends from school, in the village, that was fine. It was worse after coming back from prison because people were afraid of us. They were frightened. They’d arrested someone else before us as well, they’d taken him to Letovice and released him again after a week or so, and he ended up an informer for the Gestapo. People were scared. They were afraid of us. We rebuilt up some kind of position in time, when they saw we were patriots rather than snitches. And in the end Dad joined the local militia.”

“The gendarmes gave Dad notice, so he managed - because he owned a weapon - to throw it into the pond. And the next day the gendarmes came, they arrested Dad, Mum, and my sister, and took them to Třebíč. Then they found that I was missing, so my parents had to tell them where I was, so they came to get me in Vémyslice. The Gestapo in Třebíč took us to Jihlava, where we spent a day or so - they’d split us up, women and men separately, girls with women and us with men. It was kind of strange there, in the prison, there were seven plank beds there and about twenty-five of us. Food was the worst. Black coffee and bread in the morning, for lunch... some kind of soup, it had everything, mouldy tomatoes, all in one. You couldn’t eat it.”

“I experienced something kind of shocking while I was sweeping the floor there. Prisoners were building a swimming pool for Jöckel’s daughters. The prisoners were mostly Russian captives, and they could hardly walk, not to speak about pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with bricks. Pardon me for saying this, but Jöckel’s daughters were really bitches. They undressed in front of the prisoners, keeping only their swimsuits on, and they teased them. They had big German shepherd dogs, and if a prisoner stared at them they would release the dogs to bite the prisoners. These were terrible experiences. Or the overseer would load a prisoner’s cart with so many bricks that he wasn’t able to lift it, and he then got beaten for it. I still cannot erase it from my memory, it was so brutal.”

“They were generous. They gave us whatever they could. They were very friendly. Nobody harmed anyone. I only witnessed one nasty incident. On the main street a young girl was walking by the post office, and a jeep passed by. A sergeant major jumped out of the vehicle and tried to grab her. She resisted and screamed. After a while, another jeep with officers was going by, and the officer stopped and reprimanded the sergeant major, ordering him to leave the girl alone. Then they got into the jeep and left. But when they were gone, the sergeant major tried to attack the girl again. The officers' jeep backed up. It was quite ugly. One of the officers pulled out his gun and shot that sergeant major without mercy. He had warned him before. That was an ugly incident. But apart from this, I have nothing to complain about regarding the time the soldiers were there. They were very friendly.”

“On the last day of the war, the Russians arrived in Černá Hora in the morning. Their arrival was expected in the afternoon. When the attacking bomber planes saw the crowds and the soldiers on the market square, they began dropping the bombs. Fortunately, almost all the people from the village were in the brewery pub at that time. The brewery owners opened two cellars, where they stored their entire brew of beer, and they put the beer on tap for free. People were welcoming the Russians who arrived to the village. The village was bombed, and two 200 kilogram bombs dropped on the brewery garden, but they didn't explode. They sank into the ground. My dad had learnt something from a pyrotechnician in the army, and therefore he later transported these bombs on a cart to the highway which was under construction, and there he disposed of all ammunition that was found in the village. When the Germans were fleeing, they hid their vehicles and boxes with ammunition in the farmers’ barns in the village, and my dad then disposed of it.”

“They divided us into groups. The older ones went to some other place. They selected about twelve of us and then they divided us by our hair and eye colour. They conducted experiments on us. They gave us inoculation shots, then the antidotes, and then again and again. And then, they stopped with these experiments. We noticed that we began enjoying certain privileges compared to the others. We were receiving thorough healthcare, probably because they had some other intentions with us, or because they wanted to send us for adoption into German families. I cannot think of any other reason, because in our group, all of us were blue-eyed-boys with blond hair.”